In order to recover forestry products in an economically efficient fashion, it is necessary to have on site power-assisted machinery capable of recovering efficiently all wood products obtained when logging timber. Indeed, in the wood logging industry, large machines and trucks are required to fell upstanding trees, delimb these felled trees, load the logs into a trailer, ship these logs loaded trailers to a remote location with a truck, and eventually unload these logs to a processing facility. These large machines and trucks represent considerable capital cost, and operating them is also expensive in fuel, maintenance and labour costs.
It is noted that it is the logs per se which is usually identified as having the highest economical reclaim value, since the other parts of the tree (branches, needles, . . . ) may be simply discarded as wastes that do not warrant reclaim, and left on site in the forest. However, the needles—and to a lesser extent other tree parts such as bark and some small branches—do contain economically valuable so-called “essential oil” component therein. This essential oil can, when properly purified, be used in high margin products used in aromatherapy, in the manufacture of pharmaceutical products, in cosmetics, in perfumes, in soaps and in detergents.
Moreover, even the extracted residues from the essential oil purification process (fragments of branches and needles without their essential oil), also called in the industry the “muka”, could generate at least some economic value, in particular for animal feed as for example vitamins and proteins. Such muka could be used in place of antibiotics as food supplements for animal feed, which is desirable in view of limiting as much as possible use of antibiotics for medical treatment in order to deter development of microbial resistance to antibiotics in the digestive tract of these animals—and of humans who may eventually eat meat from these animals.